China’s e-commerce giants deliver new market cap highs

China’s two e-commerce majors announced impressive news on the same day: Alibaba Holding Group’s market cap broke the $400 billion mark for the first time; rival JD also saw its share price hit a record high of $46.84.

Alibaba’s shares reached a record high of just over $160 in trading Thursday, generating a market cap of $409 billion. The price has since slipped but is part of an onward trend for the e-commerce and tech giant which has seen its share price rise steadily since a low of $60.89 in February 2016. In Q2 2017 alone, the company’s stock has risen 31% on the New York Stock Exchange. The surge followed the announcement in March of revenue growth of 45% to 49% over the following year.

Alibaba’s lows and high (Image Credit: Yahoo Finance)

This new high has been a long time coming. Alibaba’s launch price was $68 per share on September 19, 2014, and closed at $93.89. It then promptly slid for the next month. By March 2017, 2.5 years since going public, they had recovered to just over $100, a gain of just 11% compared to a 28% increase for the NASDAQ in general and 21% for the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Over the same period, Amazon’s market capitalization rose from $152 to $407 billion, and then on to $499.96 billion today, a 228% increase. Similar patterns can be seen for other tech majors such as Facebook, Alphabet, and Apple. On the day of Alibaba’s IPO in 2014, Tencent’s shares were at HK$125, HK$207 in early March and HK$305 now, 145% growth, an even greater increase than Alibaba’s recent surge.

JD sees record high Thursday 27 July (Image credit: Yahoo Finance)

JD has seen a similar pattern to rival Alibaba, after its IPO a couple of months earlier. By the time Alibaba joined it as a publicly-listed company, JD was trading at $28.35 and also reached a new high on Thursday, of $46.84, an increase of 65%.